The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that has emerged in the recent years.
NFC mainly enables the exchange of small amount of data between an NFC device at one end, and another NFC device, an NFC smart card or and NFC reader at the other end.
Potential applications of NFC technology comprise e-ticketing and e-payment, for instance. In both latter cases, a NFC device may, for instance, emulate a contactless credit card which is compliant with existing standards such as EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa).
Nowadays, such wireless devices as smartphones or digital tablets, for instance, are among the favourite user devices for implementing NFC technology.
In this case, the wireless device may act as a wireless contactless smart card using a card emulation mode and also a contactless reader using a reader emulation mode. It may also be able to communicate directly with another NFC device using a peer-to-peer mode.
In order to determine and guarantee that such devices are able to operate according to NFC related standards and specifications, a test of the whole NFC system may be carried out prior to the delivery, for instance, to a wireless device manufacturer or directly to the end-user.
However, all the components of a NFC system being usually combined in a single chip, the testing of the NFC functionality may be very complex.
Conventionally, Radio Frequency (RF) chips are tested using either a rack and stack set of bench top equipment connected to a Personal Computer (PC) or with a complete set of commercially available Automated Test Equipment (ATE) which uses both external hardware and software parts to set-up and control the execution of a test program.
However, those equipments are costly and not economically suitable for testing high volumes of complex RF Integrated Circuits (ICs).
One alternative to avoid the added cost of using an external ATE instrumentation to test RF ICs may be to use built-in-self test (BIST) function directly in the Integrated circuit (IC).
The BIST approach uses on-chip signal generation and analysis in order to provide on-chip tester resources that would otherwise be implemented in external ATE, for instance.
Loop-back testing is a good candidate technique to implement BIST, wherein a signal is transmitted from a transmitter (TX) of a communication device and returned to a receiver (RX) of the communication device after passing through all the circuitry as a way to determine whether the device operates correctly or not.
However, examples of implementation of this technique focused, so far, on RF transceiver block test and logic block test, thanks to, for instance, the use of switches inserted in the RF transceiver block and in a test circuit, as described in document (1000), BOYON, Kim, et al. “An advanced full path loop-back testing techniques for embedded RF Identification (RFID) System-on-a-Chip (SoC) applications”. Microwave Symposium Digest, 2008 IEEE MTT-S International. p. 85-89.
In document (1000), RF transceiver block test comprises analysis of RF signal characteristics such as channel power flatness of TX signal, Low Pass Filter of TX and RX parts or RX baseband gain. On the other hand, logic block test comprises analysis of Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog components.
In view of the foregoing, it appears that testing of NFC mode of operations such as card emulation mode, reader emulation mode and peer-to-peer mode is not adequately addressed in the art and that no proper solutions have been proposed to date.